


All the Way to the Moon

by honey_wheeler



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Disguise, F/M, R plus L equals J
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-04
Packaged: 2018-04-24 16:49:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4927441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Dragon Queen had been gracious. Sansa would keep her name and her home. Her children would grow in Winterfell as Starks, just as she once had. Sansa had forced herself to thank the Queen, her steady tone betraying none of the bitterness that curled beneath her tongue. That she should be a brood mare to ensure succession sat uneasy, no matter that it was a life she most likely would have sought for herself, more or less, given time and a husband of her choosing.</p><p>That was not the bargain, though. Jon Snow was the bargain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Way to the Moon

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the story of Odysseus and Penelope

Thrice wedded and never bedded. That’s what’s said about her, by nobles and smallfolk alike. Sansa’s maids attempt to keep the chatter from her, but she didn’t spend years under the tutelage of Petyr Baelish for naught; knowledge is power, even if it is unflattering.

Littlefinger seems a lifetime away. In truth, Sansa is not even two handfuls of years older than she was when she left Winterfell, but it seems as though she’s lived a dozen lives since then. In a way, she has. Each place has necessitated a new personality, sometimes even a new identity, each journey leaving her older beyond the time spent, if not always wiser. Now she’s back in Winterfell, expected to be the same Sansa she always was.

It is with surprise and dismay that she finds that Sansa to now be ill-fitting.

Winterfell has changed and stayed the same much like she. All the pieces are there – the room she dreamed in as a girl, the steps she skipped down each morning in her eagerness to greet the day, all the towers and walls and hills that were once as familiar to her as her own hands – but the life has gone out of it. No longer do the walls echo with the laughter of her siblings, there is no more ringing of swords from the training yard. It may not always have been cheerful, the Winterfell of her youth, but neither was it as somber as all this, on the other side of wars waged and deaths suffered. It’s why she’s here; there must always be a Stark in Winterfell. Sansa had never expected the duty to fall to her.

The Dragon Queen had been gracious. Sansa would keep her name and her home. Her children would grow in Winterfell as Starks, just as she once had. Sansa had forced herself to thank the Queen, her steady tone betraying none of the bitterness that curled beneath her tongue. That she should be a brood mare to ensure succession sat uneasy, no matter that it was a life she most likely would have sought for herself, more or less, given time and a husband of her choosing.

That was not the bargain, though. Jon Snow was the bargain.

Jon Targaryen, really. The name is still foreign on Sansa’s tongue, and she has to remind herself each time that he’s no longer even half her brother. His relation to her now is something different altogether. She’d married him by proxy, a full year ago, standing before the ancient weirwood in the cloak of her own family, placed about her shoulders by a stranger. Not that Jon would have been much less of a stranger. She had not even said goodbye to him the last time she saw him, all those years ago. In some abstract way, it had seemed that he had never left. Her head may have known he went north to take the vows of the Night’s Watch, but in her heart, he seemed fixed in Winterfell, constant as she changed, static as she roamed. They’d all stayed here in her memories, all her brothers, only for her to return and find them gone forever. Sansa had once dreamed of having half a dozen babes, almost exactly like her mother. That dream died long ago, as surely as her family had; what irony, then, to find herself with the duty of doing just that. 

There are rumors about Jon as well, and Sansa knows them all. He takes no lovers and has no family, as if he hadn’t been cast out from the Night’s Watch by shouted oaths and daggers, saved only by a magic he did not believe in. He patrols the Gift as much as lives in it, following old habits despite the changes in the world that have made them unnecessary. That’s something Sansa understands. It’s something she thinks they could discuss. If he ever came home, that is. Part of her would be glad enough for him to stay where he is, were not yet another missive from the Dragon Queen burning a hole in her pocket, this one less than patient.

She’s not sure when she decides that her only choice is to go after him. But then the why of it matters less than the how.

*

The road north is long and tedious. Once Sansa had dreamed of traveling the world; now she’s seen too much of what it holds and would rather keep to what’s hers. Winterfell will never be fully hers, though, not without a Targaryen heir, no matter that any child of hers will be a Stark. It is the tie that’s important. And so she journeys when she would rather stay home, the letter from Queen Daenerys her mind’s constant, unwelcome companion the whole of the trip.

It is yet another journey she makes as Alayne. Gemma had helped her darken her hair before they set out, and each morning she shows Sansa how to twist and tuck her hair into plain northern styles, until Sansa is able to do it for herself. Even if the elaborate braids and crowns of King’s Landing or the simpler, more elegant styles favored in the Vale wouldn’t make her a sore thumb here in the far north, the bastard girl Alayne wouldn’t have the cadre of maids that the Lady of Winterfell does to allow her to achieve such styles. Alayne has only herself, and so Alayne must make do.

She’s lost count of the days when they finally cross into the Gift. Little had seized her attention on the way and so she’d let her mind wander, imagining lives that could never be, and other lives that had stopped and turned aside. As they so often do, her thoughts had turned to Arya. Alone of Sansa’s siblings, Arya is neither living nor dead, but rather exists in a state between the two, at least to Sansa, who cannot imagine she’s alive when she’s made no contact, but refuses to believe her dead. Whatever she is, she almost certainly is not the Arya Stark that was, no more than Sansa is, nor even Jon.

Her party makes camp just south of Brandon’s Gift, or as near as they can tell. When Sansa was a girl, she’d imagined the lines on maps showed on the ground itself. It had been a disappointment to find that sometimes places varied only in name. Her orders to them are to wait, for however long they must, but Sansa wouldn’t be surprised if some deserted to make their own lives in the half-wild lands around them. She’s never commanded the loyalty her father did.

She and Brienne ride on alone, unspeaking. With each mile, Sansa sinks more into Alayne, becoming the bastard girl that Brienne had found in the Vale, adopting the same lowborn manner she’d acquired by careful observation, as she once would have learned the steps of a new dance. It must seem queer to Brienne, to see Sansa regress so, but she says nothing. It’s a relief. Sansa can barely defend or explain her actions to herself.

Jon’s home is in a windswept valley, a place of no name and little presence. She sits her horse on a ridge overlooking the rundown holding, dispassionately taking in the patched roofing, the muddy yard, the freshly tilled fields that wouldn’t yield enough food to sustain any other estate for even half a moon’s turn. Brienne holds her horse slightly behind Sansa, quiet as ever. Suddenly Sansa is embarrassed – for Jon, for herself, for their family. She sits straighter on her horse and draws her cloak around her herself like armor.

“Well,” she says, sparing it one last look. “It’s no Winterfell.” She turns her horse away from the ridge, glancing over at Brienne and flinching inwardly at the compassion on her plain face. “Supper first,” Sansa decides. “Better to go at nightfall.”

The truth is, her courage has failed her for the moment.

Supper is a rangy hare caught in Brienne’s trap, charred without and near raw within for the haste with which it’s cooked. Sansa cannot make up her mind. One moment she wants to press on, urging Brienne to hurry their meal, but the next she wants to turn tail and run, musing aloud that perhaps she should stay the night here and leave with the dawn. Her nerves seem to communicate to Brienne. When finally Sansa stands and makes ready to mount her horse and go, Brienne hesitates at her side, her linked hands held far too high to allow Sansa’s foot to reach.

“My lady,” she says, her voice rough as if from disuse. “It you should have need of me…”

Something about her apprehension calms Sansa’s own. She smiles, feeling a surge of fondness for her awkward lady knight. “I should do what?” she asks, gently teasing. “Light a candle in a window?”

Brienne flushes, looking sheepish. “I could stay with you,” she says. “I _should_ stay with you.” Impulsively, Sansa lays a hand on her forearm, though all she touches is an armored vambrace. 

“He is my husband, Brienne.” And her onetime brother. “I shall come to no harm.”

When she spurs her horse down the slope in the moonlight, she half thinks she might hear Brienne’s mount at her heels. Though she agreed to stay behind, Sansa knows it must chafe her sense of duty. She has entirely too much of that for her own good. In that, it seems, she is much like Jon.

*

It’s a strange thing, trying to seduce a man. Sansa has more experience dissuading than enticing. She’s deployed every trick she knows, everything she learned from wooing Harry, from manipulating Petyr, from flattering Joffrey, but to no avail. Jon is as awkwardly cordial to her on the fifth day as he was the first, and even more so on the fifteenth, blushing at her flirtations but never moving to action. It’s not a sort of frustration she’s used to.

It had been more of a shock than she anticipated to first see him. Even in the dark of night he looked so like her father than she could scarcely hold back tears. He’d welcomed her without question, offered her his hospitality, what little of it there was in such a place; that Jon chose to stay here rather than rejoin her in Winterfell scarred her pride like a brand. She’d wept herself to sleep the first night, straw digging through the mattress ticking to jab and scratch her skin.

The next day she saw Ghost and nearly wept again right there on the spot.

When she’s been there long enough for the moon to turn from waxing to waning, she’s at the brink of desperation. He shows so little inclination to bed her that she becomes suspicious. No lovers, all the rumors say, but Sansa wonders. The boy Satin serves him with a devotion bordering on slavish, and the woman Val… Well, no man could be unmoved by such beauty and fire. Sansa finds herself scrutinizing his every move around them, looking for clues the way she’d once looked for information to serve Littlefinger and protect herself. She finds no hint of deeper intimacy or feeling, but she’s as angered and wounded as if she had. It’s entirely unlike her; she’d spent years honing her indifference to petty jealousies to a sharp edge. She puts the blame on desperation rather than examining it further, telling herself that the Dragon Queen’s mercy is a band that only stretches so far. Winterfell must have an heir, no matter that its Lord and Lady live separate lives.

It’s with this despair that she goes to him at last, when the torches have guttered low and the stars wink knowingly at her from the pitch black vault of the heavens. The latch of his bedchamber door gives easily; either Jon Snow expects none to attempt entry or he awaits the entry of someone in particular. It sends fresh anger welling in Sansa’s chest and she has to work to tamp it down. It would not do to let such untidy emotions show when effecting his seduction. The door swings open on well-oiled hinges, silent enough to go unnoticed were Ghost not brought to his feet by the sight of her on the threshold.

“My lady,” Jon says, surging to his feet much like Ghost. He’s startled at her appearance, though he tries not to let it show. She is no lady – at least Alayne is not – and he knows it, but never once has he failed to speak to her as if Alayne was as gently born as Sansa had been. It touches her even as it gets under her skin, an irrational response that makes her nearly as irritated at herself as she is at him.

“You know I am no lady,” she says. If he hears the edge to her voice, he shows no sign of it. 

“Circumstance of birth is not what makes one a lady,” he says. Jon’s smile is crooked. It touches a place deep in Sansa’s heart she’d long ago thought frozen over. She’d intended a masterful seduction, perhaps with wine and pretty words, but she finds herself stepping forward and placing her hands on the boiled leather of his jerkin. It’s halfway unlaced, as if he’d been readying for bed when she entered. Sansa itches to unlace it entirely, to uncover his chest and put her cheek to his heart. His hands cover hers there, though, stilling any movement they might make.

“My lady,” he tries again, and she steps away, lifting her hands to her own laces.

“I do not wish to be a lady this night.” Her fingers shake as she unlaces her bodice, though whether they tremble from fear that he’ll turn her away or the hope of the same, she couldn’t say. “I am only Alayne.”

A good and honorable man he may be, but he is still a man. His eyes follow her gown as it drops to the floor. She wears no shift or stays, nor even smallclothes, nothing to hide her from his gaze. Her skin, up until a moment ago, had been chilled from her journey to his room in merely a thin gown, but now it warms as he looks at her, until she’s sure she’s pink and flushed in all the places his eyes linger as they return to her face.

“Who are you?” he asks in nothing more than a whisper.

“A woman who is lonely.” Her answer is scarcely louder. His eyes hold hers for long moments, looking for something she isn’t sure he finds.

What makes him cross the room to her? A man’s desire? A bastard’s baseness? But he moves slowly, so slowly that she could believe he’s giving her the chance to change her mind. So perhaps it’s only a boy’s loneliness that brings him to stand before her, only the overwhelming desire to touch and be touched. The thought strikes an answering pang deep in Sansa’s breast and she trembles, suddenly weak before him. His eyes search hers for a long while. Helplessly, she stands and waits, returning his gaze. Up close, he’s even less like the Jon she once knew; his face is scarred and weathered, his eyes tired but still warm. The bastard half-brother of their long-distant youth had defiance in his eyes, an almost petulant mutiny at times, as if he wanted to fight the world. The man before her looks as if he’s fought the world to a draw and resigned himself to the outcome.

“What is it you want from me?” he asks softly, after looking upon her for so long she’s begun to despair.

What does she want from him? There are a hundred answers Sansa could give. Only one is truer than truth.

“I want to feel again,” she whispers. His laces give under her fingers. “Make me feel, Jon.”

His lips are on hers in a heartbeat, softer than a sigh, as if he too is desperate to feel once more, to break out of his hard-won armor and live in the world as bravely and openly as he once had. As they both had. Oh, it hurts to think of the brave children they’d once been, children who’d not yet learned the perils of being open and guileless. Part of her misses the boy that he was, no matter that she’d always held him at arm’s length, no matter that it should feel queer and wrong to kiss her long-ago almost-brother. It should, but it doesn’t; Jon’s kiss is magic. Sansa has been kissed before, but it’s never been like this. Jon doesn’t impose, he doesn’t demand. He asks. He coaxes. He gives. She’d come here with a scheming aim – albeit a gently scheming one – but it no longer feels like that. She kisses him now because she chooses to, because she _wants_ to, and the realization is frightening.

When the back of his hand skims down her hair where it lies over her breast, Sansa pulls her mouth away to gasp, her hands coming up to cling to his shoulders. “You must have had many lovers to be so skilled, my lord,” she manages on a pant. 

Jon touches his knuckles to her jaw with a smile. “Is that a compliment or an accusation?”

Sansa thinks on it, possibly more than is merited on such a simple matter. “A question,” she finally decides.

“Only one,” he answers. “Long ago.”

“Long ago? You expect me to believe such a thing?” Her smile is meant to be coy, but it just feels brittle. “Surely someone warms your bed at night.” He kisses her again, draining her of sense like he’s drinking it from her lips. “Val, perhaps,” she murmurs when he moves his lips to the corner of her mouth, and then the hinge of her jaw. Her head tips as if controlled by an unseen force, offering his lips the vulnerable stretch of her throat. For a moment she tenses instinctively, but he only presses his lips over her pulse. 

“Or…” It’s an effort to corral her thoughts. “Or Satin.” He chuckles, his tongue warm at the hollow of her ear, right at the same spot where Ghost’s fur is softest. Ghost is transported to all seven heavens when stroked just there and Sansa’s shocked to find the same thing true of her.

“Only Ghost,” Jon says, as if reading her thoughts. “Only you.” It has the tenor of truth.

This time it’s she who kisses him, ducking her head to find his lips and bring them back to hers. After kissing her most thoroughly, his lips resume their downward path. Sansa can only stand, dazed and warmed by his attentions, her hands on his shoulders the only thing keeping her standing upright. It’s when he noses at the peak of her breast and then closes his lips around it that her knees buckle. Easily, he catches her up, striding with her towards his narrow bed. She doesn’t remember his lips leaving hers but somehow he’s entirely bare when he lies down and covers her body with his. His skin is a network of scars, a prickle of coarse hair everywhere she’s softest. She’s never felt more primal, powerful despite her weakness, Mother, Maiden, Warrior and Stranger all at once. It’s too much. She’s been lonely too long. It threatens to rob her of her control and something in her panics, grasping at anything to keep from losing herself.

“You would betray your wife so easily?” she gasps, clinging to the last shreds of her sensibility. She expects anger from him, denial, anything but what she gets.

He laughs.

She feels it all down her body, everywhere she’s pressed so intimately to him, firing her blood with desire even as it fills her chest with pain. His laughter reminds her of their childhood, how the rest of them always laughed at her – so different from them, so prim and dainty and content where they were rough and dirty and happy. And now he laughs at the idea of betraying her, of lying with a woman not his wife? Need turns easily to anger, it seems. Sansa bucks at him with her whole body, intent on dislodging him. He doesn’t move. Slight and lanky he may be, but he’s also dense with muscle and Sansa might as well have tried to move a mountain.

“Sansa,” he says, catching the fists she beats against his chest. “Sansa!” So deep is her rage that she doesn’t register her name on his lips, her _true_ name, until he catches her chin and makes her look at him, not a trace of laughter left on his face.

“I could hardly betray my wife by lying with her,” he says.

“You…” Sansa’s mind reels. She’d been so sure, so utterly certain he wouldn’t know her. Hasn’t she gone through a hundred lifetimes since they knew one another? Hadn’t she left herself behind forever ago? Jon’s eyes are soft and warm as he looks down at her, too compassionate by half, his smile infinitely gentle. It should make her soft as well. Instead it makes her rough. When Jon kisses her again – tentatively, as if fearing rejection – she pulls at his shoulders, nips at his lower lip. She wants to break him, to destroy him. She wants to be consumed by him. It’s all she can survive.

It’s a different thing, to lie with him, knowing he knows who she is. Alayne was easier, less complicated somehow. Now every touch holds the weight of history, every frisson of pleasure brings confusion with it, and all Sansa can do is surrender to the uneasy mix of love and longing and anger that she feels. This is not how it should have been between them. It is no more his fault than it is hers, but he’s here, absorbing her anger, answering her longing with his own, the two of them making a space together where perhaps their marriage can change and grow into something new.

For all the gentle care of his kisses before, he’s not gentle when he fucks her, and she’s glad of it. He doesn’t hurt her – he’d never hurt her, that she knows beyond doubt – but neither does he handle her as if she might shatter. After a lifetime of being coddled and dismissed, it’s a relief to have him so certain of her strength. Once she adjusts to the invasion of his body, she meets his every thrust, gives back every half-wild kiss. Something tells her that though he is no virgin, it has been so long for him that he may as well be. It’s a kinship between them, one that makes her far gladder than careful expertise would have. No matter whose he was before her, he is hers now, and his rough ardor soothes her heart even as it arouses her flesh.

She holds him tight to her when he spends, arms around his shoulders, legs wrapped around his waist. She’d come for an heir, to ensure her safety and solidify her future, but that is not why she clings to him so tightly. He lies heavy on her breast, the deep draws of his breath pressing him into her in a way that frustrates as much as it soothes. Finally he stirs, lifting his head to look at her with soft, unfocused eyes.

“Sansa,” he says, almost wonderingly. His fingertips are light on her lips, her chin, her brow. “I’d begun to think you wouldn’t come.”

“Here to the Gift?” she asks, startled. How could he have known she would leave Winterfell to find him here when she hadn’t known herself. He chuckles and shakes his head.

“To my chamber. I’ve left the door unlatched since you arrived.”

Heat floods through every bit of her body, turning the dull throb of pleasure still pulsing between her thighs into a fiery ache. His eyes darken, and he shifts aside, resting his hand low on her belly, curving, pressing, caressing. There’s a question in his eyes as he looks at her, some wild need she couldn’t possibly name. He must see the answer he looks for, because his hand moves lower, seeking.

Finding.

It has never felt like this, not when she’s touched herself alone at night in the safety of her bedchamber. Just as brushing her own hair never felt as lovely as it did when her mother brushed it, just as she could never tickle herself but Robb could send her into gales of laughter with just a few wiggles of his fingers, just as a lemoncake cooked by someone else tasted better than any she could ever make, Jon makes such touches a thousand times more intimate, a thousand times more potent. A thousand times sweeter and more frightening and _better_. Sansa gasps and clutches at his shoulders, her knees instinctively spreading as if she truly is the baseborn girl she’d pretended to be. He gives rough encouragement, saying “That’s it, Sansa, there’s a girl, there’s my sweet girl,” and she could almost be ashamed at how her heart laps up his words, how desperately she wants his praise and approval, how much she needs him to care. When she peaks, it’s more than she ever knew she could feel.

They lie twined together until dawn, sometimes fucking, sometimes just lying still and listening to each other breathe. It isn’t until the sun’s light breaks through the shutters and paints a lattice on the wall over Jon’s bed that Sansa feels like speaking won’t break the spell.

“How did you know?” she asks, knowing he’ll understand her meaning. “Am I so unchanged?”

“No,” he answers. “But you’re still Sansa.”

“You haven’t seen me since I was a child,” she presses.

“Sansa,” he says, then takes a long pause, as if weighing his words carefully. “Even if I hadn’t recognized your face, I would have recognized the look on it when you saw Ghost.” Grief floods Sansa as if it were fresh; the piece of her that was torn away with Lady’s death has never grown back. She must have looked so stricken when she saw Ghost, so filled with longing and kinship. For a moment she can only press her face to his chest, hiding like a small child from the pain and terror that will never fully fade, no matter how long she lives. Jon only holds her. It seems it’s been a hundred years since someone has simply held her.

“Why did you make me come after you?” She presses a kiss to his collarbone to take any accusation out of the words, then feels her cheeks flush, embarrassed at her impulsive tenderness. Jon’s arm tightens on her shoulders for a moment before he answers.

“I wasn’t sure you’d want me.” A lifetime is in his words, the life of a bastard boy who believed home and family were never meant for him. It feels disloyal to her mother to feel as sad as she does for him. It feels disloyal to _herself._

“I wasn’t precisely given a choice,” she says, unable to keep anger from rising in her chest.

“I know, Sansa.” Jon’s voice is quiet, sincere. His quiet acceptance makes her feel guilty, embarrassed, even angrier. It seems there isn’t a single emotion that isn’t fighting in Sansa’s heart at the moment.

“And I’m not your choice either,” she says. He smiles in response when she looks up at him, her chin pressing into his chest. His shrug – one she feels under her cheek and chin – is neutral enough, but his eyes are so warm that Sansa could almost believe he _did_ choose her. She puts her cheek back against his chest. There is too much to think on, too much change to handle.

“I wish…” she begins, then trails off in frustration. She wants to pound his chest with her fists. She wants to kiss him and never stop. She wants the world to be simpler than it is.

“What is it you want from me?” he asks.

It’s the simplest and most complicated question in all the world. He’d asked the same last night, and the intervening hours and events haven’t made her heart any clearer. She wants so many things. She wants her family back, wants a family and children of her own. She wants Lady and love, and for the songs to comfort her as they once did. She wants to be the girl she was, while keeping the woman’s knowledge she’s gained. She wants to be at peace. But what does she want from Jon?

“I want you to take me home,” she whispers at last. His arms tighten around her to the point of pain and she feels his lips pressed to the top of her head.

“Then that’s what I’ll do,” he says, and for now that’s enough.

 

*

_title from So Spoke Penelope By Tino Villanueva_


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